Uruguay President José Mujica tells Fox News that Uruguay's new law legalizing marijuana is better than Colorado's new law. Why? Because in Uruguay, they regulate users, not just sellers. Under their new law, pot-smokers will be treated like cows.

“Right now, every cow, 13 million of them, are registered here,” Mujica said. “We know where they were raised, what they eat – we’re the only country that does that,” he said. “We are going to apply a process just like that to marijuana laws.”

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She's running, if you had any doubt:

Clinton told the audience that middle class incomes had stagnated over the last decade even as the average worker’s productivity had increased significantly in the same period. She pointed to studies that showed 4 out of 10 children born into the lowest rung on the economic ladder remained there as adults. [...] “And where is it all going?” Clinton asked. “Economists have documented how the share of income and wealth going to those at the very top, not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent, the 0.01 percent of the population, has risen sharply over the last generation,” she said. “Some are calling it a throwback to the Gilded Age of the robber barons.”

She also explicitly contrasted her husband’s record on inequality as president with President George W. Bush. “The 1990s taught us that even in the face of difficult long term economic trends it’s possible through smart policies and sound investments to enjoy broad based growth and shared prosperity,” she said. She denounced the Bush administration for squandering those economic gains as well as a budget surplus [--]“That’s what happens when your only policy prescription is to cut taxes for the wealthy and then to deal with the aftermath of a terrible terrorist attack and two wars without paying for them,” she said. “Regulators neglected their oversight of the financial sector and allowed the evolution of an entire shadow banking system that operated without accountability.”

For those who remember all my posts on former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on his failed policies on helping homeowners, here are some fancy Chicago economics professors saying the same thing:

Atif Mian and Amir Sufi are convinced that the Great Recession could have been just another ordinary, lowercase recession if the federal government had acted more aggressively to help homeowners by reducing mortgage debts.

The two men — economics professors who are part of a new generation of scholars whose work relies on enormous data sets — argue in a new book, “House of Debt,” out this month, that the government misunderstood the deepest recession since the 1930s. They are particularly critical of Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, for focusing on preserving the financial system without addressing what the authors regard as the underlying and more important problem of excessive household debt. They say the recovery remains painfully sluggish as a result.

Geithner really stunk.

I potted my very first plants today. This one is sweet basil. I also got mint, cilantro and italian flat parsley. [More...]

The judge in Oscar Pistorius' case yesterday rejected forcing him to undergo a 30 day inpatient evaluation. Instead, saying it was not supposed to be punishment, she ordered an out-patient evaluation. The evaluation will take place at a hospital on the outskirts of Pretoria, and Oscar will be able to spend nights at his uncle's house, where he has been living since the shooting.

That's good news for Oscar and quick thinking by his lawyer, who suggested it as an alternative to the typical in-patient eval.. His family gave a statement afterwards, saying they were pleased by the decision.

The only people who seem disappointed are the journalists covering the trial, since it throws their schedules into disarray. [More....]

I've been writing briefs all day and I'm not yet done.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Oscar Pistorius is back in court as his defense team continued to call witnesses.

The defense psychiatrist, Dr. Meryl Vorster, testified as to Oscar's vulnerability as a double amputee, and the prosecutor asked to have the trial delayed and Oscar sent for a 30 day mental evaluation.

This is gamesmanship. The witness clearly stated Oscar knew the difference between right and wrong. There's no indication or defense claim he was insane or suffering from diminished capacity such that he couldn't appreciate the nature of his actions at the time of the shooting.

The Aspen Times has an in-depth article about the largest marijuana grow site in the state. Turned down by Aspen, the facility ended up taking over the old Coors warehouse in nearby Glenwood Springs.

It's located in Glenwood Springs and owned by Ron Radkte of Green Dragon. The building is 26,000 square feet, enough to make it the state's biggest so far, but by the time Radkte is finished with improvements, there will be more than 60,000 square feet of grow space and storage.

Radkte is committed to both the quality of his product and environmental concerns. It sounds like the "Whole Foods" of marijuana: [More...]

David Cole in the New York Review of Books has a new article, "We Kill People for Metadata" on the mistaken notion that the NSA's collection of metadata in its pursuit of terrorists is no big deal because it does not collect the content of communications, only details about them. First he quotes NSA counsel Stewart Baker:

“Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

He then quotes General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA:

“We kill people based on metadata.”

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Glenn Greenwald has written a new book, No Place to Hide, that is getting great reviews. It's about the chaos in the hours and days following the Edward Snowden disclosures. The Guardian has an excerpt here. From Amazon's page on the book:

Now for the first time, Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.

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To all our readers who are Moms, we wish you a very Happy Mother's Day. And for those of you who are not, if your mom is still around, be thankful and don't forget to call.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the holiday -- it was President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 who declared the second Sunday in May would be Mother's Day.

Colorado is getting a big snow storm today -- there are already 16 weather alerts up from the National Weather Service.

Enjoy the day, this is an open thread, all topics welcome.

My posts all week seem mostly drug-related, even more so than usual. It may be because of work, or it may be the result of spending two hours a night watching El Capo 3 and La Viuda Negra. El Capo 3 actually takes more time, because the station comes in so weakly, even with an amplified antenna, I end up re-watching it online afterwards, courtesy of some sites in Pakistan, South America or Europe. [More...]